eat cinema. drink coffee. live forever.

(numbers are ages)

• late teens-early 20s — World-renowned dancer in the Max Reinhardt-run Deutsches Theater.
• 22 — Became the first female star of the popular mountain film genre, working with GW Pabst, among others.
• 30 — Co-wrote, directed, and starred in Das blaue Licht.
• 32 — Directs Triumph of the Will, the most notorious propaganda film of all time; Riefenstahl later claimed to regret making the film and the way the Nazis used it, but her work for the Third Reich continued to haunt her for the rest of her life.
• 34 — Documented the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, resulting in the groundbreaking sports film Olympia.
• 37 — Became a war correspondent.
• 38 — Escaped to the German countryside to begin filming the epic opera Tiefland.
• 40 — Sinti and Roma gypsies from nearby concentration camps were forced to work as extras on Tiefland. Despite overwhelming evidence, Riefenstahl denies any knowledge.
• 43-46 — Arrested and held in detention camps by the Allies.
• 58 — Left Europe to live with the Nuba, a group of native peoples living in the mountains of Southern Sudan. She lived with them, documenting, filming and photographing their lives, for fifteen years.
• 72 — Obtained a scuba diving license (after lying about her age) and began shooting underwater documentaries.
• 93 — Joined Greenpeace.
• 97 — Survived a helicopter crash while visiting her friends the Nuba in war-torn Sudan.
• 100 — Released her underwater documentary Impressionen unter Wasser on her 100th birthday.
• 101 — Married her long-time partner Horst Kettner, a man 40 years her junior.
• 101 — This is what she looked like when she died in 2003 (seriously).

I would definitely recommend you watch this documentary on her life. Very challenging, difficult, but fascinating stuff.

fuck you very much, tumblr gods

just putting that out there